Building an Executive-Caliber Client Partner Team
BetterUp returned to Formative to build a new kind of GTM team. Following a successful strategic sales leadership search in 2024, their talent team tapped us to help establish a Client Partner function responsible for representing BetterUp in its largest, most strategic enterprise engagements.
The team had already spent five months searching internally. This was not a conventional enterprise sales hire: BetterUp needed senior leaders who could earn the confidence of a CHRO, shape a meaningful transformation agenda, and connect that work to a commercial opportunity. Positioned one level below BetterUp’s executive tier, these roles required executive-level judgment and influence in a highly specialized, client-facing seat.
Origin Story
The right candidates sat at the intersection of three rarely combined backgrounds. They needed substantial enterprise transformation experience as an internal operator, human-capital consulting experience, and advanced academic grounding in organizational or behavioral science. None of those credentials was sufficient on its own.
Our first job was to define what that combination needed to accomplish. We helped BetterUp distinguish leaders who had personally shaped C-suite decisions and driven consequential business transformation from those who had advised or supported the work. The bar was not simply expertise in people strategy. It was the ability to bring that expertise into a senior commercial relationship.
Early interview data sharpened the distinction. Consulting-heavy candidates often performed well in initial conversations but were less consistent when tested against the role’s practical demands. Candidates who paired consulting experience with substantial operating responsibility proved stronger later in the process, helping us refine the target profile around demonstrated execution rather than pedigree alone.
There was also a candidate-conversion challenge: the people best qualified for the role were not necessarily looking for a GTM position. For many, joining BetterUp meant stepping away from an established senior career path into a function without a familiar equivalent.
Challenges
We made an unconventional role legible to an exceptionally specific talent pool. Instead of presenting it as a move away from consulting or operating leadership, we positioned it as an opportunity to bring the full breadth of a candidate’s experience into one seat: advising senior executives, shaping enterprise transformation, and translating that work into commercial value.
That narrative was grounded in intensive calibration. Before launching, we worked with BetterUp’s talent and senior leadership teams to understand the business mandate, examine prior search learnings, and align on what success actually required. Interviews with internal benchmark profiles gave us a more actionable starting point than a broad title-based market map.
Throughout the search, we used candidate feedback and interview-stage conversion data to refine the profile. Our compensation intelligence also helped BetterUp adjust its range to the caliber of talent the mandate demanded, rather than compromise on seniority to fit the original budget.
Our Value
Three Client Partner hires completed, with the first two offers accepted within 43 days of intake. Approximately 90% of direct candidate submissions progressed to interview, demonstrating precision in a search where conventional titles and career paths were unreliable indicators of fit.
The result was more than three placements. BetterUp gained a clearer, tested definition of the talent its new function required and a compelling way to attract it. For Formative, the engagement demonstrated what specialized GTM search can deliver when commercial success depends on an unusually narrow combination of executive credibility, domain depth, and operating experience.
"We went back to Formative after they ran a great sales leadership search for us in 2024, this time to build a brand-new client leadership team right when we were growing fast. The role sat just below our executive team, and they treated it that way from the start. In the first two weeks they screened 125 candidates, because we didn't have a clear ICP yet and wanted to test every kind of profile. Then they used what they heard in interviews to tighten it up. The people they brought us were seasoned leaders with real options, the kind who can sit across from a CHRO as a peer, and Formative gave them a real reason to join a role that didn't exist anywhere else. Almost everyone they presented made it to interview, our first two hires said yes within 43 days, and we ended up with three great hires and a much clearer idea of the talent this team needs as it grows."
Derek Kokich, Head of GTM Recruiting